Foreign language exchange trip: failed

[lovingboth]

I did badly at French when I was at school. Last in the class at the end of year one* exam, and it went downhill from there.

On the plus side, it did mean I was put into 'economics / government and politics' from year two rather than Latin (those who did well) or German (those in the middle), so I only ended up failing the one O-level..**

.. so badly, it didn't appear on the certificate as a fail. Result, even if I thought I was going to get at least an 'E'!

Yesterday, we were told that the girl JA stayed with on her German exchange trip earlier this year has failed.. something, possibly just English.. so that her school is keeping her back a year and she's not being allowed to go on the return visit here in a couple of weeks time.

Even I think that's unfair.

* What I'm supposed to call year seven now.

** Which I'm still a bit annoyed about: at the end of year three when it came time to pick options for O-level, the school said we could drop French. Then, when the results were in, said 'Oh, we were lying – we just wanted to see how many people would drop it if they could. Which they can't.'

Mirrored from my website's blog, The deranged mad of a brain man.

Comments

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

Oh, FSM - that's ridiculously unfair. One might view an exchange visit as a perk, but surely, it's of such great value to everybody - every bit of worldliness helps grow one as a rounded individual, regardless of the strictly linguistic benefit.

Our schools did things differently, with Latin being all but expected. =:) I did okay with it; I'm pleased I took it, regardless, given how much of an underpinning Latin forms in many popular modern tongues. French I did fine with, though I've used it shockingly little in recent years, which I'd like to correct - I got on quite well with how it's put together, and my accent wasn't too bad. With any luck, I may get a good opportunity or two in the coming year, with one sister living in NW France, and whom I haven't visited in ages, with the last time we met being at Dad's funeral a couple years back. (Back in the day, I bought the original French versions of some Tintin adventures, as it took forever for English translations to appear for a few of them, including Tintin and the Blue Lotus, and Tintin in the Congo, the latter being very much a product of its time, shall we say)

Are you not really one for new languages, or was it French in particular that proved your nemesis?

[lovingboth]

I'm really not one for new languages.

I can do some petite bits of French now, but nowhere near enough to do more than visit.

[ludy]

Does that mean you get to host a Random or nobody?
It's very unfair. I don't think the student-who-was-kept-back-a-year should have to miss out (even though I can see it could cause her scgool some logistic problems) but it's even more unfair to penalise JA and stop her from having the social experence of histing as well as the linguistic experience (because daily life with a non-native-speaker of your own language is an intresting communication challenge no matter how fluent they are)

We were told we would beed a modern Language GCSE to get into uni. I was deeply annoyed to find out later that wasn't true because doing French with at-the-time undiagnosed dyslexia was horrible both for me and my teachers! (annoyingly the rest of my family are natural linguists - I say that i'm the portrait in their attic!)

[lovingboth]

No-one.

Yes. We're being tempted - if school holidays match up - to invite her over another time.

When I was doing A-levels, Oxford, Cambridge, most of the Scottish universities and possibly one other insisted on a foreign language. As I was in the 'Oxbridge-capable' group, the school did suggest that I could do some other language in order to get over that hurdle, but it'd have been a big ask for me to actually pass it.

[ludy]

I was only the second year to do GCSEs (and pre-National Curriculum) so no one was really sure what Unis and employers would want ...